Is it perhaps that the Church at that time was losing site of it’s mission? It’s mission to focus on saving souls and the next life? Did the Church start trying to move to a more “temporal” “relevant” place, a kind of progressive revolution to conform more with the “Modern World” and the “Gloria Mundi”, than with Christ’s teachings? Or maybe Saint John Paul II was Pope for so long that they simply forgot about it.

I know from personal experience that the progressives took “The spirit of Vatican II” and ran with it to places the conciliar fathers never dreamed of going. Sic Transit. Kind of like a large pimple on their collective juvenile progressive noses they squeezed for all they were worth and the pus squirted everywhere, contaminating and infecting everything. At the time, knowing very little, and being very full of myself, I felt that my church had left me first and so I had little compunction about leaving the church myself. Ah, the vanity of youth.

Placing the temporal rewards of power and prestige and influence on a higher pedestal than the next life would be understandable if one was only discussing the works of men. But 盛者必衰 “The prosperous inevitably decline, the full inevitably empty”. This is Christ’s Church we are talking about.

Back in 2013, Salon Magazine ran an article titled: “Is Pope Francis a Fraud?” which plays to all the embittered ex-catholic wanna-be’s who are covered by Chesterton’s famous comment: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried”. I guess you can follow Church teachings, or you can just get your faith and philosophy from Salon. Your call.

Any human who thinks that there is a necessity for the One Holy Roman Catholic Church to seek conformity with the progressive modern world to retain relevance is patently insane and never was a thinking person to begin with. They lack the courage of their convictions, the courage to stand on their own two feet and declare unambiguously “Non Serviam!” Instead they want to hide their deviance behind the vestment of “Catholic”. Sorry, there are only saints and sinners in the Catholic Church, If you want respectability go Anglican or Episcopalian.

To conform with progressive modernity would be to cease to exist as the Roman Catholic Church.